Serve Less Meat with Stretcher Ingredients

Meat can be the most expensive ingredient on a dinner plate, but for people who enjoy it, it's definitely a must in their meals. A family can enjoy meat without breaking the grocery budget with these five meat stretching tactics.

Crackers and Bread

Ground meats are the easiest ones to stretch, but they don't always have to be beef. Ground Turkey, Chicken and Pork can all offer different degrees of leanness and lots of variety. When using ground meats it's easy to mix crushed crackers or soaked bread into the meat to help it serve more people. This will also help to keep the meatloaf or meat balls moister and more enjoyable.

Rice

Rice can also be used in meat balls, but two of my favorite ways of using it to stretch meat are stuffed veggies and fried rice. Chopped leftover meat or ground meat can be mixed with cooked rice, spices, and chopped onions and garlic, and stuffed into many different vegetables, like tomatoes, peppers, or hollowed out zucchini and then roasted until the everything is cooked through and tender. This is nice topped with bread crumbs or a bit of shredded cheese.

Fried rice is just as simple and every bit as filling. Good additions for fried rice include leftover beef, chicken or pork, pepper chunks, pineapple chunks, onion, scrambled eggs, peas, carrots, snap peas, and sesame seeds. This is a dish that can easily grow to huge proportions and feed many people when all the ingredients are added, and will make a small amount of meat seem like a feast.

Potatoes

Potatoes are filling and can help to stretch smaller meat portions among more people in a number of ways. Using them in a meat stew will help it to seem more hearty. A restaurant trick is to grate them and fry them, and put the hash browns on most of the plate, so the meat can be a smaller portion. Using the small amount of meat in a gravy or white sauce allows it to be served over mashed potatoes (or noodles), making it go further at the meal.

Eggs

Eggs are less expensive than meat, but are any excellent source of protein as well. They can be filler and binder in ground meat dishes like meatballs and meatloaf, are an excellent addition to dishes like fried rice, and are great with steak or pork chops when the portions of those meats seem a bit puny. No hostess wants to serve small steaks, but if there's not enough to go around, due to unexpected guests or a mistake in planning, cutting them in half and serving them with a couple of fried or scrambled eggs is a novel approach. They can be boiled and chopped and added to chicken salad, tuna salad, or salmon salad, to help bulk those up. Eggs can also be used scrambled to help stretch leftover meats, turning them into great filling for breakfast burritos, when shredded and mixed with the eggs, a small amount of shredded cheese, and a touch of salsa.

There are lots of different ingredients that will help a small amount of meat go a long way in meal planning. Looking at the meat as a flavoring agent for different starches and veggies is a good tactic to help save money at the grocery store, and stretching it with other ingredients in another.